100 Years of Gratitude

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The Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, near Belleau, France.CreditCreditWilliam Daniels for The New York Times

By Richard Rubin

Aug. 21, 2014

We forgot.

It’s not entirely our fault: Americans have been conditioned by nearly a century of British revisionist histories to believe that the United States didn’t do much in World War I, and by countless anecdotes about rude cabdrivers and haughty waiters to believe that the French don’t much care for Americans.

But both beliefs are, in fact, mistaken, and a big reason the second is untrue is that the first is quite far from true, and the French know it. They have never forgotten that when the war was mired at a grim stalemate and they and their British allies were exhausted nearly to the point of collapse, it was the Americans — fresh and eager to fight and showing up in great numbers — who stepped in, just in time, and tipped the balance. True, the French don’t speak much English, and they charge an outrageous amount for a small bottle of Coke; but they are grateful. Very grateful. They remember. Go to France and they’ll remind you, too.

One afternoon this summer, I set out from the village of Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, in the French region of Lorraine, to find a certain farmhouse. I had spent the morning tromping around local fields and through forests, searching for vestiges of the Great War, including places connected to some of the three dozen or so American World War I veterans, aged 101 to 113, whom I had interviewed starting in 2003. The house I was looking for now, though, had a more notorious association: In 1914, as the Germans were first taking the area, a young second lieutenant named Erwin Rommel stopped there to eat and rest.

A guide I know drew me a map to the place. Good thing: Like a lot of Lorraine, in the northeastern corner of the country, this area is quite rural, and much of what you might want to see here is not accessible by the kind of roads many Americans would recognize as viable thoroughfares.

I managed to find the place, took some photos, and was about to get back into my car when a silver Nissan 4x4 pulled up. A ruddy, thickset man in his 60s with bright blue eyes climbed out and greeted me, friendly but clearly wondering what I was doing there. I asked him, in rudimentary French — he spoke no English at all — if he knew about Rommel and this house. He didn’t; but that house, he quickly added, gesturing at a smaller edifice a half-mile off on the other side of a couple of small gates — Douglas MacArthur had been there in 1918. “Do you want to see it?” he asked, smiling.

I climbed into his truck as he unlatched the first gate. When he stopped on the other side to close it again, several cows and calves lumbered up amiably. His land, he explained, comprised several old farms; the one to which we were heading had been known in 1918 as La Tuilerie. It, and all of what was now his property, was then part of the Kriemhilde Stellung, a stretch of formidable German fortifications that was part of the Hindenburg Line, the invader’s ultimate chain of defenses in France.

“There was a German narrow-gauge railroad running all through here,” he explained, gesturing up at a rise to his left. “There was a station up there. And they had four machine-gun emplacements: there, there, there and there.” He stopped to unlatch another gate. “MacArthur,” he said, pointing at some forested hills to his right, “came from over there, early in the morning. Division 42. October ’18.” The French don’t feel the need to specify the century when talking about that war, which they call “ ‘14-'18” as often as La Grande Guerre.

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German trenches in the woods near Romagne-sous-Montfaucon.CreditWilliam Daniels for The New York Times

The Tuilerie house looked as if it hadn’t been inhabited in a long time; it still had four walls but no roof. “MacArthur was here,” my host announced, a bit awed. It was Oct. 14, 1918; La Tuilerie was the site of some particularly fierce fighting, the Germans raining fire down upon the Americans from a nearby hill, the Côte de Châtillon. (The Germans, you quickly learn, always seemed to have topography on their side.) Young MacArthur, the legend goes, had been ordered to take Châtillon or show 5,000 casualties for the effort. He famously responded that he would, or his name would be first on that list.

Now my host gestured at a tree line not far away. “Those woods,” he said, “are full of German trenches. Want to see?” We bushwhacked until we came to a series of ditches, eight feet deep or more, jagging this way and that every few yards, sometimes intersecting with other deep, zigzaggy ditches. The passage of a century had not eroded them much at all; there was no mistaking them for anything else. I slid down into one and darted around until I saw him gesturing again, deeper into the woods.

“Out there,” he said, “are two German blockhouses. Want to see?”

We bushwhacked for another five minutes or so until we came upon two massive concrete bunkers crouching in a depression. They were quite stark and, like the trenches, unmistakable, though so covered in flora and fallen trees that it took a while to figure out how to get to them. Finally, I grabbed a vine and swung down to one, my host calling me “Tarzan.” (We still hadn’t exchanged names.) I pulled a flashlight out of my pocket and climbed inside the first one, then made my way over to the other. They were empty but solid, remarkably well preserved considering that the Germans had abandoned them 96 years earlier. One had a hole for a periscope.

Soon he was telling me about something else and asking, yet again: “Want to see?” We spent nearly five hours together that afternoon, driving across fields and through little villages where this or that had happened in the fall of 1918, until we ended up on a rugged dirt trail atop a wooded ridge. A few yards below on either side were more networks of German trenches, some trailing off to pits that had once held machine-gun emplacements or howitzers. This was the Côte Dame Marie, high ground of paramount strategic importance to the Germans. For four years, they had used it to repel French assaults and thus retain possession of a large chunk of the Argonne Forest, the key to controlling a vast area. Then, in October 1918, the American 32nd Division, National Guard troops from Wisconsin and Michigan, managed to wrest it away from them, at the cost of many American lives.

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Douglas MacArthur visited this farm near Romagne-sous-Montfaucon in 1918.CreditWilliam Daniels for The New York Times

My host, Jean-Pierre Brouillon, beckoned me over and gestured down the hill through a section where the trees weren’t too dense so I could see the grade of the slope, which looked to be around 60 degrees. He pointed at the foot of the hill, a few hundred yards below. “They came up from down there, into machine guns, rifles, artillery, everything,” he said, and looked at me with an expression that said: Can you believe that?

“The French didn’t drive the Germans out of here,” he declared, visibly moved. “The English didn’t do it.” He shook his head at the thought of what it must have taken to charge those heights. “Just the Americans,” he said. “Only the Americans could do it.”

The Great War’s centennial, which starts this month, presents Americans with a fine opportunity to explore the important role their country — and their ancestors — played in that conflict. But there are some challenges: The war happened a hundred years ago and four thousand miles away; and beyond that, it was so, well, great, in every conceivable metric, that it can seem impossible to grasp. You hear things — nearly a million men fell just at Verdun in 1916; in four years, the combatant nations suffered a total of 40 million dead, missing, and wounded; more than 116,000 Americans died in just 19 months; billions of shells and bullets were fired; the map of the entire world was forever redrawn — and you can’t help but wonder: What can I possibly make of this? How do I even begin?

You could start big, at one of the enormous American World War I monuments in France, or one of the vast American cemeteries Over There. Or you could start as small as a single name. There are people who fixate upon MacArthur, or Col. George S. Patton or Capt. Harry S. Truman or Sgt. Alvin C. York, or their own grandfather or uncle or that nice man who used to cut their hair when they were growing up. But you can also just visit one of those American cemeteries — perhaps one of the “smaller” ones, like Belleau Wood (officially known as Aisne-Marne) — and pick one at random. Here you go — Section B, Row 6, Grave 51: Earle W. Madeley. 102 Inf. 26 Div. Connecticut. July 21, 1918. There’s nothing on his marker (or anyone’s) about where or how he died, but history books record that in July 1918, the 102nd Infantry Regiment, part of the 26th Division, was fighting to drive the Germans out of the village of Belleau, just a few hundred yards behind where you’re standing. The stone does mention that Earle W. Madeley was a corporal, probably a man of some initiative, courage, leadership. Perhaps that’s what got him killed.

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A woman looks over the landscape near a ridge known as the Chemin des Dames. The ridge was the site of terrible fighting during the war.CreditWilliam Daniels for The New York Times

He and the other 2,287 Americans buried at Aisne-Marne have been gone for nearly a century, but somehow when you stand there, it doesn’t feel that way at all. That’s because there is in France, where William Faulkner’s famous statement that “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past” seems insufficient when it comes to ‘14-'18. The French still speak of World War I with such emotion that you’d think it was 1914, not 2014. Mention the war — and in France, “the war” always means ‘14-'18, not ‘39-'45 — and you will hear passionate declamations about generals, tactics, credit, blame, what might have been. Arguments are frequent, and fraught: France lost more than simply a generation of men; in some areas, every last village was destroyed. Many were never rebuilt, though they’re still listed on French maps and still appoint mayors.

You can hire a guide — there are plenty — or just be your own. Step into almost any patch of woods in certain parts of Lorraine or Champagne or Picardy, and you will find lots of trenches and shell holes, even some massive craters. Climb any hill and you may well find pillboxes, bunkers, blockhouses; stroll through any freshly plowed field and you might just spot shrapnel, cartridges and bullets atop the furrows. And maybe a shell.

Don’t touch that last one: It may still be live. Even now, people are being killed and maimed by World War I ordnance. Faulkner wasn’t kidding.

Yes, a century later, America’s Great War is still right there on the surface for you to behold and touch (except for the shells), at Belleau Wood and along the Marne in Champagne, at St.-Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne in Lorraine. But before they fought at those places, Americans — some of the first to arrive in France — spent much of the winter of 1918 in a place that had seen some of the war’s most terrible fighting just the year before, an 18-mile-long ridge in Picardy known as the Chemin des Dames. And it was there that they left a mark unlike any other you will find. They wanted you to find it, too. But you’re going to have to make an effort.

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Artifacts left by American soldiers during the war in underground stone quarries near the Chemin des Dames.CreditWilliam Daniels for The New York Times

First, you’ll need to find someone who can take you there; my guide, Gilles Chauwin, has been exploring the area for 50 years. When the Germans took the Chemin des Dames in 1914, they discovered that, in addition to offering valuable high ground, the ridge was filled with old subterranean stone quarries that afforded excellent protection during French artillery bombardments. (Again, the Germans always seemed to have the best real estate.) They quickly made themselves at home underground, running electricity and telephone lines through the old tunnels and carving out barracks, kitchens, infirmaries and command posts. Compared with being up on the surface, it was comfortable and safe, and German soldiers spent a lot of time there.

The entrances to the mines are barred; Gilles, lying on his belly and reaching through a grate to open two locks, explained that these places have been plagued by poachers and souvenir hunters in recent years, and there isn’t the money to keep them maintained and protected adequately. (“Next time you come,” he asked me, “could you bring along Bill Gates?”) You have to climb down two steep ladders, maybe 15 feet each, to reach the floor, then turn on your flashlight and start walking. It won’t take long before you start to see names carved in the walls or written in ink: Gefreiter Loth. Jager Jammasch. Landsturmmann Schmitz. A musketeer Cohn carved a niche above his name; people still place candles in it. There is artwork — a simple etching of a nurse, an elaborate Maltese cross, a caricature of a French soldier. One anonymous German soldier wrote, in Latin and blue ink: “HAIL CAESAR — WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO DIE SALUTE YOU.”

This, though, is just prelude. A bit farther ahead, the names become American: B. W. Townsend. J. A. Kelly. Otto Contardi. Ned Perry. Michael L. Jay. Joseph R. Gemski. These are some of the 25,000 men of the 26th Division, the “Yankee” Division (so called because it was composed entirely of National Guard units from New England), many of whom took shelter in these mines in the winter of 1918, after the Germans had left. Eighty-five years later, I interviewed 106-year-old Cpl. J. Laurence Moffitt, the last survivor of the Yankee Division; I hadn’t known much about Chemin des Dames before those conversations. Everyone in the YD, though, had heard all about the slaughter that took place just above their heads the year before, and they understood, like the Germans had before them, that anything might happen when they climbed back out into the world. For all they knew, these walls might be their last chance to leave something behind in this world. They took advantage of them, carving eagles, schooners, flags, swords, hearts. They drew women, Indian chiefs, French soldiers, German soldiers, themselves. One artist drew an elaborate tableau of a chained maiden — Belgium — being menaced by a Prussian soldier as the American flag storms in to rescue her. Another sculpted a remarkable likeness of the Bunker Hill Monument. Someone chiseled a good-size rectangular niche in the wall and wrote above it: 4th Platoon Mail.

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Scenes along the Chemin des Dames.CreditWilliam Daniels for The New York Times

They celebrated the Masons, the International Order of Odd Fellows, the Knights of Columbus, the Ancient Order of Hibernians. And their hometowns: Goshen, Mass.; Thompsonville, Conn.; Nashua, N.H.; Mount Vernon, N.Y. And their units: Company K, 102nd Infantry; Company A, 101st Machine Gun Battalion; Company C, 101st Field Battalion, Signal Corps; 102nd Sanitary Detachment; the Crack Bomb’n’ Team of the Second Section, Company I; the Midnight Squad; the Bucket of Blood. And they celebrated themselves, inking Rolls of Honor (qualifications unspecified) and messages like “Good Night, Now the Emmetts are here.” In one section, I spotted “In Memory of the Details of Co. C, 101st Inf.,” followed by six names and “May They Rest in Peace”; Gilles Chauwin told me he’d researched those six names and found that at least four of them survived the war. Perhaps they hoped they might inoculate themselves by printing their death notice in advance.

Corporal Madeley didn’t leave his address, in Plainville, Conn.; but you know where to find him now.

John B. Shanahan, Company G, 101st Infantry, could easily have known Earle Madeley; they were both corporals, both sheltering in the same section of mine in the winter of 1918. Maybe they chatted idly to pass the time; maybe Corporal Shanahan got the sense, somehow, that they might not make it. We can’t know, of course. What we do know is that at some point, Corporal Shanahan took a black pen, found a clean section of wall, drew a cross and a hand pointing to a radiant heart, and wrote:

Merciful Heart

of

Jesus

Have Mercy

on us

Up there on the surface, there are plenty of monuments — large and small, stately and intimate, powerful and curious — commemorating the fact that a great many Americans perished in France in 1918. But down here, in this mine, the walls testify that before they were names on memorials and gravestones, those Americans were people — young, and cocky, and scared, and alive.

Richard Rubin is the author of “The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Over There: The first in a series of articles that will explore
World War I sites and battlefields in France.

IF YOU GO

WHERE TO STAY

The Best Western Hôtel Île de France in Château-Thierry has a breakfast buffet and a fine restaurant for dinner. Rooms start at 89 euros, about $104 at $1.30 to the euro (60, rue Léon Lhermitte; 33-3-23-69-10-12; hotel-iledefrance.com).

La Scholastique is a bed-and-breakfast in the small village of Le Neufour in the Argonne. The owner, Denis Hebrard, is also a guide to the area’s World War I sites and leads tours. Rooms start at 50 euros for single occupancy (Le Neufour en Argonne, 33-3-29-88-29 19; lascholastique.fr).

WHERE TO EAT

Les Bigoudènes in Château-Thierry specializes in crepes. Prices from 10 euros (55, grande Rue; 33-3-23-83-15-64). The town has several other appealing restaurants and bakeries.

In Ste.-Ménehould, in the Argonne, first-rate meals can be had at the restaurant at the hotel Le Cheval Rouge (1, rue Chanzy; 33-3-26-60-81-04; lechevalrouge.com) and La Passerelle (2, rue des Prés, 33-3-26-60-40-27).